Description
Recently, some opera productions have increasingly appeared to be “curated” by stage directors, even more so than in the tradition of Regietheater (director's theater). This trend, first noted by Jelena Novak, involves directors assembling segments from musical history or arias from classical operas and “curating” them into a new creation. I illustrate this trend through the 2024 pastiche Le lacrime di Eros by Romeo Castellucci at the Dutch National Opera, based on early Baroque chamber and theatrical music. In this production, the narrative thread is nearly nonexistent, as references are made intermittently to mythological characters like Orpheus and Eurydice, who primarily exist in a contemporary world, appearing on stage in two cars and committing suicide.
Christoph Marthaler employed a similar hybridizing and multitemporal approach when staging the canonical opera The Coronation of Poppea (1643) by Claudio Monteverdi last year at Theater Basel in Switzerland. This production included spoken interludes by Pasolini and D’Annunzio, along with musical interludes by Senfl and Schoenberg. Other innovations featured Mussolini’s daughter as a non-singing character, casting an actor who sang in French as Nutrice, using the conductor as an on-stage singer, and having all characters perform a madrigal.
I interpret this trend, which can also be observed in the United States, by invoking the “postdramatic” paradigm introduced by Hans-Thies Lehmann to describe theater and dance performances, which is rarely adopted for opera (except by Novak, David Levin, and Ulrike Hartung). However, it is not coincidental that the productions I discuss utilize works from the early Baroque period. I expand the postdramatic concept to encompass trends already present, I argue, especially in seventeenth-century Italian opera as "pre-dramatic." This is why the "post-" concept is well-suited to interpret the stagings of musical works from that era, but it loses its heuristic value for subsequent periods.
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